From Amazon.co.uk:
"In The Body Artist, Don DeLillo sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld) - an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the window and makes idle chat. Rey, alas, will proceed directly from the breakfast table to the home of his former wife, where he'll unceremoniously blow his brains out.

What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?

DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. Still, when DeLillo reigns in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking.

At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better."
-- James Marcus

Reserved for the 1001+ Books VBB.

Update 28th January 2009:
Chosen from the box by FamFatale. It is still tbr, but shouldn't take too long.

A weird one to be sure. Part lyrical and beautiful, part incomprehensible (to me anyway), part mystical, part boring, part compelling, part inane, part poignant, part of a bit of many things . . .

I'm sure that inside it all there was some point he was trying to make.

Now off to FamFatale - sorry it took me longer to get to it than first planned.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Posting airmail to FamFatale in the USA as part of the 1001+ Books VBB.

I have found many of the books on the 1001 list to be a bit weird. My impression of the first chapter turns out to be so very wrong....

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Released to Bartonz in the 1001 books virtual bookbox

It's here and I look forward to reading it :)